Cottingham: Take advantage of local resources

Posted: Friday, December 16, 2005

Connie

Cottingham

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Athens and The University of Georgia have some of the top horticulture folks around, which is a great bonus for us gardeners hungry to learn. This means we have an abundance of seminars and lectures available to us, which friends of mine in other parts of the country envy. In next week's column, I will discuss some of these upcoming garden events.

Another benefit is two of the top gardening reference books that should be in your library are doubly useful because they were written here in Athens. Both authors include personal experience growing many of the plants here. Have you ever picked up a plant book at a sale table only to find the English author is not giving you any information that is usable in your yard? Well, this is just the opposite, as if the books were written just for your yard. Lucky us!

If you are a gardener, "Herbaceous Perennial Plants: A Treatise on their Identification, Culture and Garden Attributes" by Allan Armitage and "Manual of Woody Landscape Plants: Their Identification, Ornamental Characteristics, Culture, Propagation and Uses" by Michael Dirr should be on your bookshelf. Sometimes mine are open on the deck table as I am gardening.

These books are thick, pricey tomes, each with more than 1,100 pages. They are among the most worn of the hundreds of gardening books in my library. The most recent editions were published in the late 1990s and are still very useful. Both Armitage and Dirr have written several other books that are well worth owning, but if I had to choose just one from each author, I would stick with the ones just discussed. Armitage's new book on native plants will be released soon and Dirr released a beautiful book on hydrangeas last year.

Armitage and Dirr are two among numerous horticultural experts in the Athens area. I flew from Little Rock to Florida several years ago to attend a five-day urban forestry conference where Kim Coder was the most memorable speaker. Imagine my surprise when I moved to Athens and he was the speaker at a monthly Master Gardener meeting! This year, Coder, professor of Community Forestry and Arboriculture at UGA's Warnell School of Forest Resources, was selected by the Georgia Urban Forest Council to receive a Lifetime Achievement Award. He is an award-winning author with more than 400 publications, many of which can be found at www.urbanforestrysouth.org.

Sam and Carleen Jones, owners of Piccadilly Farm in Bishop, received the 2005 Perennial Plant Association Award of Merit for their contributions of teaching and writing and their work with Lenten Roses. Sam Jones is also a prolific garden writer, author of over 100 articles and co-author of two books.

Remember driving to your local County Extension office to pick up brochures on gardening? Now when you need more information, you can log onto www.caes.uga.edu/extension and browse through gardening articles written by Georgians for Georgians. They are even open at 4 a.m. How convenient is that?

One thing I love about eclectic Athens is you can sit in a café and you don't really know if the person at the next table is someone who just talks about doing something someday or just came back from speaking at a national conference, teaching in another country, or a concert tour of Europe. Athens has a wealth of talent in many fields, which create great opportunities for us to learn.

 Connie Cottingham is a landscape architect, registered in three Southern states, who lives and gardens in Athens. She can be reached at connicotti@bellsouth.net.